A simple truth about driver turnover

Swift Transportation has appointed Scott Barker vice president of driver engagement, a new position. According to Heavy Duty Trucking, Barker will be in charge of “support” for Swift drivers.

That kinda reminds me of the public relations business. I once spent six miserable months working for a PR firm. Most of the time, my job was trying to get a client company’s name in the press. The idea was to raise their “profile, ” to show what a great bunch of deeply caring, patriotic, eco-friendly guys they were.

At other times, the job was something like the opposite – what they call crisis management. Here the job was to get the press to stop talking about your client company, or at least stop saying nasty things about them. The crisis usually occurred when a company did something heartless, illegal, or just plain stupid and got caught.

For example, the executives who thought it was a smart idea to dump gack in the river are outraged at the media for reporting what they’ve done. So they stonewall or lie to the press. That’s somebody else’s gack! And even if was ours, what business is it of yours? Of course that just encourages reporters to dig deeper.

Now they have new gack revelations appearing day after day. It’s an ongoing disaster, a real crisis. This gack-in-the-river thing just won’t go away. What should they do? Someone suggests they hire a PR firm, so they do (probably spending more than they saved dumping that gack in the river).

At this point, the PR pro does two things. First, he or she holds their hand and sympathizes with them about that nasty, dishonest press. Those guys are the worst. Really terrible. They have no scruples.

That kind of talk puts the executives at ease. Then the PR pro delivers the bad news: There’s only one way to end the crisis. End all the bad stories with one single bad story and get it over with.

The cure: Tell the truth.

Yes, folks, big-time corporations pay big bucks just to hear that very simple advice – something they should have learned in first grade. Fess up, promise not to do it again, and get back to work. Oh yeah, and maybe fire some foreman in the waste disposal department for show. Crisis over.

That brings us back to Swift and Mr. Barker. I’m sure he’s a nice guy. You don’t create a job like vice president of driver engagement and give it to a despicable creep. At least you shouldn’t.

But why does Swift see the need for a vice president of driver engagement in the first place? Could it have anything to do with the sad, slow, never-ending, driver turnover crisis?

According to their website, Swift operates nearly 20,000 trucks. Let’s say it has 70 percent turnover. That means Swift must be hiring nearly 54 drivers every business day. That’s 14,000 drivers a year.

Now if that many drivers come and go, something’s seriously wrong. You could say it’s a crime – in a social and human sense if not legally. Unfortunately, the press pretty much ignores this particular crime. I guess they accept the carrier assertion that the colossal turnover of truck drivers is “normal. ”

Okay, so it’s a sketchy parallel between that gack-dumping company and Swift Transportation. But in one important way it is much the same. Just like the gack-dumper, Swift and its compatriots in the truckload universe won’t deal with a simple, obvious truth: They don’t pay drivers enough.

Driver engagement, driver advocacy, and driver cuddling are fine. It may look great to customers and legislators, but it’s not going to seriously affect – never mind solve – the turnover problem.

For big truckload, the industry leaders who set the pace of business, it’s less a matter of telling the truth than facing it.

Pay drivers and they will come. Pay drivers and they will stay.

Now, Mr. Swift, my consulting fee will be $10,000 (which I will gladly donate to raise the pay of the underpaid drivers).

John Bendel is Land Line freelancer and editor-at-large. A trucker for 10 years, he has been a trucking journalist for more than 14. His inimitable insight and matchless style of writing makes his series in Land Line – “Gizmos and Gears” – a runaway reader favorite.

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